WIPs; DVD commentatries; narcissism narcissism

There is a meme going round where you post the filenames/titles of your WIPs without explanation.

I am not doing this, because my WIPs are apparently.... not like other people's. Other people have outlines and completed scenes or whatever; I, in contrast, just sent a fic off to beta that spent a significant amount of time as a WIP consisting of a named file and one line from a Weepies song (and everyone says this love will change you / and I asked, does anything ever stay the same). Like that. Yeah. They have filenames like "discworldfic2" and "ohgodwhy" and "ohgodwhy_pasttense".

More crucial to the meme, I don't keep them all in the same folder: they live in folders by fandom, not by state of completion, so they're all over the place.

Here are some of them, anyway.

Harry Potter, gen, 3000 words, hanging around half-written for, oh, dear, three years. In which Hermione is arrested, the summer after Voldemort is defeated, for doing magic in front of a Muggle, and is put on trial by the Wizengamot.

( they had no choice but to let her keep talking )

Star Trek reboot, currently about 2000 words, I plotted out the entirety of this fic lying in bed one night and then forgot it all. I've been trying to remember it ever since. I know how it was supposed to end, and that it started on a dark night with the Enterprise in orbit around the new Vulcan colony world.

( McCoy had the distinct impression he was walking into a domestic dispute )

Doctor Who, Rory. This is the entirety of the WIP. I don't have the slightest memory of writing this! Not the slightest. Oh dear.

( after a year he remembers sunshine )

Firefly, an AU where a lot of things were different but I have of course forgotten precisely what.

( Inara waits )

Also, not WIP-related, the meme I posted a couple of days ago:

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

gamesiplay already asked me for one of these:

"New life, new civilisations." He pauses. "They join the Federation and the diplomats sign the treaties, and then the scientists are sharing data and the cultural specialists are taking great dives into each other's libraries and the engineers are off doing, I don't know, whatever it is engineers do."

In his left hand, he holds a Sigman beacon. It activates in response to his touch, and McCoy throws back his hood, holds up the shining white light and brings it around in one long pendulum sweep. All's well, for settlements and satellites to see. Even Enterprise's sensors will make out the flare. It means the quarantine camp has made it through another day.

McCoy walks around the embers, carrying his light. "And they put me in my lab with the new humanoids and we compare notes on the traditional scourges – the old cancers, sexually transmitted wasting diseases, that kind of thing. And then we've been at it a couple of hours, and they turn to me and they tap their heads in a significant kind of way, and I stare back and shrug. No, we don't know what to do about that, either – and the look of disappointment? That's always the same, too."

( note: mental health is the main theme )

Anyone wants one, just ask. (Fic here).